BlazeTV anchor Sara Gonzales, along with Grant Stinchfield and Zuby Udezue, addressed a frightening article in the Washington Post that appears to try to “normalize pedophilia” on “The News & Why It Matters.”
His enthusiastic assessment of the “Downstate, a sparkling new play,” appears to urge more compassionate handling of sexual predators, whom he defines as “four men of different age and backgrounds eking[ing] out marginal lifestyles in lowly occupations and managed routines. The house is comparable to an island whose beaches are washed with contemptuous waves. Their frantic caseworker treats each objection or request… as if it were a passenger in steerage trying to request a clean blanket.”
“Take a deep breath and attempt to meditate calmly upon this position writer Bruce Norris takes throughout his dazzling new play, ‘Downstate,’” Marks said.
“Are you still here? It’s nearly impossible to broaden the perspective at the heart of this well-performed drama without seeming as if one is preaching some incredible amount of compassion for people who have perpetrated horrible crimes. Yet, at off-Playwrights Broadway’s Horizons, Norris provides a twist on this theme: he wonders how much sympathy society can extend to people who have served time for sexual abuse, assault, or rape.”
Marks continues to claim that Norris “loaded the dice to some extent… as the predators whom have served their prison stints are depicted as multifaceted, tortured beings rather than monsters.”
“There’s no sweeping the horrific crimes for which the guys have been brutally punished under the threadbare rug in ‘Downstate.’ We learn about what each one of them has done, and we are then asked to decide how much ongoing pain each deserves. It begins as an agonizing moral argument, one that our retributive penal culture would prefer not to discuss.”
Sara, Grant, and Zuby all agreed that perhaps the Washington Post article is just the newest in a “larger agenda” to “normalize pedophilia,” a subject that recently made the headlines in the wake of fashion company Balenciaga’s disturbing latest advertising campaign featuring images of children clutching “bondage” teddy bears and also the text of a Supreme court case that involved child pornography.
